How to Convince People of Facts Online

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You can put corrections in brackets and red italics, but they
still won't stick in people's minds if they don't want to believe
the truth. That's one of the conclusions of a new study about the
effectiveness of corrections to information online.

Not everything you read on the Internet, as the saying goes, is
true. Yet what kinds of corrections will work best to convince
people of the facts? A new study of 574 people examined two
different ways of presenting corrections, to see which would work
better and with whom.

Reading a correction on a separate website, after a delay, works
moderately well with most people, the study found. But there's a
split when corrections appear right inside a story, in brackets
with red italics. Those whose political beliefs line up with the
corrections are more convinced the corrections are true, while
those with opposing political beliefs act just like a control
group that saw no correction at all. [SEE ALSO: Wi-Fi
Names Reveal Political Beliefs, Map Shows ]

"We see stronger bias in the response that people have to
corrections when we do it in real time," said R. Kelly Garrett, a
communications researcher at Ohio State University who led the
study. That's too bad, he said, adding: "One might hope
that approach would work well because it would allow you to
correct information at the source, before it has the chance to
spread."

There's one upshot to Garrett's findings. They show that separate
fact-checking websites such as Snopes or Factcheck.org work
pretty well for people with all kinds of political beliefs, he
told TechNewsDaily. "It works for everyone. Everyone becomes a
bit more accurate," he said.

Yet in the future, Garrett thinks people may see more real-time,
embedded fact-checking. Companies are working now on browser
add-ons that automatically find incorrect statements — things
like "President Obama wasn't born in the United States" or
"Vaccines cause autism" — and offer the expert consensus on the
topic. "It's not a huge area, but there are certainly a number of
projects focusing on this topic," Garrett said.

Many previous efforts to make such software, such as a 2009
project called Dispute Finder, failed because not enough people
downloaded it, Garrett said. Nevertheless, he predicted the
current generation of insta-fact-checking browsers will take on.
"I still believe in the idea and I think in five year's time we
will see something like this out there," he said.

He hopes his research will guide the design of
insta-fact-checkers. Perhaps the browser add-ons could collect
their findings in a report at the end of the day, instead of
embedding comments. They might also tailor their tactics to
users' personalities, Garrett said.

In an age of cable networks and endless blogs and social media
posts, Garrett thought a browser that shows people what the
expert consensus is could be a relief.

"People are having to rely on their own ability to sort through
competing claims, more than ever," Garrett said. "One answer [to
that problem] has to do with building tools that help us sift
through this chaos."

Garrett and his doctoral student, Brian Weeks, will present their
work in February, at a conference hosted by the Association for
Computing Machinery.